Usain Bolt of Jamaica set a world record in the men’s 100m, clocking 9.72 seconds at the Reebok Grand Prix meeting at Icahn Stadium in New York on Saturday.
Bolt bettered the mark of 9.74 set by countryman Asafa Powell last September.
The 21-year-old, the 200m silver medalist at the world championships, dashed out perfectly at the start after a false start and touched the finishing tape ahead of 100m world champion Tyson Gay.
Gay finished second in 9.85, with his fellow American Darvis Patton a distant third in 10.07.
“It was a great start,” Bolt said, “I’ve been working hard at that. I gave you what you wanted.”
Earlier this month, Bolt stunned the athletics world by running a 9.76 in Jamaica, the second fastest time ever registered and only his third competitive race over the distance.

Evolution of men’s 100m world records

10.6 seconds, Donald Lippincott, United States, July 6, 1912
10.4, Charles Paddock, United States, April 23, 1921
10.3, Percy Williams, Canada, August 9, 1930
10.2, Jesse Owens, United States, June 20, 1936
10.1, Willie Williams, United States, August 3, 1956
10.0, Armin Hary, West Germany, June 21, 1960
9.99, Jim Hines, United States, June 20, 1968
9.95 (electronic), Jim Hines, October 14, 1968
9.93, Calvin Smith, United States, July 3, 1983
9.92, Carl Lewis, United States, September 24, 1988
9.90, Leroy Burrell, United States, June 14, 1991
9.86, Carl Lewis, United States, August 25, 1991
9.85, Leroy Burrell, United States, July 6, 1994
9.84, Donovan Bailey, Canada, July 27, 1996
9.79, Maurice Greene, United States, June 16, 1999
9.77, Asafa Powell, Jamaica, June 14, 2005
9.77, Justin Gatlin, United States, May 12, 2006
9.77, Asafa Powell, Jamaica, June 11, 2006
9.74, Asafa Powell, Jamaica, September 9, 2007
9.72, Usain Bolt, Jamaica, May 31, 2008

from: beijing2008.cn

Usain Bolt has admitted he needs to work on his start and finish in the 100 metres, yet the 21-year-old Jamaican is eager to test himself against world champion Tyson Gay in the Reebok grand prix on Saturday.
Bolt, world silver medalist behind Gay in the 200 metres, stunned athletics by running 9.76 seconds, the second-fastest 100 metres, at the Jamaica International on May 3 and will face the American over the distance for the first time on Saturday.
“My start is the toughest part of my race,” the 1.96m tall Bolt told reporters on Thursday. “I think that’s because I’m kind of tall. I’m working hard and hopefully I’ll get it right.”
Bolt’s coach Glen Mills said his height worked against him at the start, but his ability as a 200 metre runner to sustain top speed made him a 100-metres force to be reckoned with.
“He’s never going to be a great starter at that height,” Mills said. “You just want to be in the race for the first 30 meters….to be in striking distance and take it from there.
“He has to work more than say a more explosive guy like Asafa (Powell) or Gay. He has got to do a lot of pushing off that track to get to top speed, like getting a car revved up. But once he gets there he’s as good as anybody out there.”
Bolt was also aware he needed to keep his concentration throughout the race and not ease off before the finish line.
“I was just looking to see what time I was running,” he said of his run in Jamaica. “I wasn’t expecting to run that time. So when I got near to the line I was just looking. I wasn’t really slowing up, I was just looking at the clock. It is a bad habit.”

IMPROVING SPEED

Bolt has been running the 100 metres to improve his speed for the 200 and the results have been impressive. He came within two-hundredths of a second of compatriot Powell’s world record of 9.74 in just his third competitive race at the distance and was now looking forward to his showdown with Gay.

Betrayed finally by the body which once hurtled along a track faster than any man in the world, Maurice Greene reached journey’s end this month.
At the age of 33, the 2000 Sydney Olympics 100 meters champion conceded that he could not get in shape in time for the Beijing Games and announced his retirement.
“I was getting these little nagging injuries that have just stopped me from training the way that I need to,” Greene told Reuters in a telephone interview from Los Angeles this week.
“It’s a mental battle trying to come back from injuries and I don’t feel like having that mental battle with myself.”
American hegemony in the men’s 100 metres has been taken for granted since the rebirth of the Olympic Games in 1896. In reality, there have been lulls; notably in the 1920s and 1970s and again in the 1990s, the decade when Greene’s raw talent first became apparent in his home town of Kansas City.
After Carl Lewis had run his last great race at the 1991 Tokyo world championships, Linford Christie won the 1992 Olympic title for Britain in Barcelona.
Christie captured the 1993 world title and was then succeeded as world and Olympic champion by another Jamaican-born sprinter, Canadian Donovan Bailey.
Meanwhile, Greene was eliminated in the quarter-finals at the 1995 Gothenburg world championships and, hampered by a hamstring injury, failed to qualify for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics team.

Maurice Greene, former US world and Olympic champion in the 100m and 200m sprints said he would not be competing in the 2008 Games and that his future would probably be in coaching. The veteran Greene, who won the 100m and 200m gold in Sydney in 2000, said that he was sad he would not race here in August but felt the United States had a worthy successor in Tyson Gay

HARD PATH
Greene came up the hard way. In Kansas City he worked in fast food outlets, emptied trucks and tore tickets at a movie theatre. Frustrated by his lack of progress in athletics, he decided in 1996 to drive to Los Angeles with his father Ernest to train with John Smith, by common consent the best sprint coach in the world.
“I just told myself I needed a change,” Greene recalled. “If I really wanted to do something I had to go to someplace else. I decided to go to John Smith.
“He worked me very hard. He asked me what I wanted to do and I wanted to be the best in the world.”
Training with the equally competitive Trinidadian Ato Boldon, who was to finish second to the American in Sydney, Greene set out to attain his goal.
“We knew if we both wanted to be successful we had to work together to get to where we wanted to be,” Greene said.
“He taught me things and I learned a lot from him and we began to study the sport more and learn more things about the sport. We became a dynamic duo.”
Greene’s breakthrough came in 1997 when he won the world 100 metres title in Athens. In the following year he set a world indoor 60 metres record of 6.39 seconds which still stands and then came his golden year of 1999 when he clocked a world 100 record of 9.79 seconds in Athens and the first world 100-200 double in Seville.
“Everybody was talking about U.S. sprint domination being over,” Greene said. “As a U.S. athlete I don’t like that kind of talk.”

JOHNSON TIME
The 100 record held particular significance for Greene.
Bailey’s mark of 9.84 set at the Atlanta Games was the official mark. But everybody knew that Ben Johnson had clocked 9.79 at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, a record that was never ratified after the Canadian’s positive test for steroids.
“I started to really study races and that’s when I really started to piece together how to run that sort of time,” Greene said.
At the turn of the century, Greene was at the top of the world, a position confirmed in 2000 when he won the Sydney Olympic 100 and anchored the 4×100 relay team to victory.
Then came the 2001 Edmonton world 100 final which developed into what Greene believes was his best and also his most frustrating performance.
Greene hobbled over the line after sustaining quadricep and hamstring injuries. Incredibly he still clocked 9.82 seconds, only 0.08 seconds outside Jamaican Asafa Powell’s current record.
“If you look at the race closely, at 65 metres there was a grimace on my face. I just hobbled the rest of the way. The good Lord let me finish that race and I still ran 9.82,” he said.
Asked what the time would have been had he not been injured, Greene replied: “I would say around 9.6.”
Injuries came increasingly to define Greene’s life, although there was one last chance of glory at the 2004 Athens Olympics when he believes he should have beaten compatriot Justin Gatlin.
Greene eased up in the semi-finals and paid for a slow time by getting lane seven in the final, won by Gatlin ahead of Portuguese Francis Obikwelu with Greene third in the closest Olympic three-way 100 metres finish.
“I should have run all the way through instead of easing up. I would have had a better lane and then I could have felt what was going on in the middle of the track,” he said.
“I basically ran that race blind. I’ve always said I messed that race up, I threw away my gold medal.”
Greene’s record stands comparison with any of his predecessors and his tally of 52 sub-10 second marks, far ahead of Powell’s 33, shows his remarkable consistency.
Asked recently who he considered the greatest 100 metres sprinter ever, Powell did not name Lewis or 1936 Olympic quadruple gold medalist Jesse Owens.
Instead he chose Greene “because of his technical abilities and his consistency over the years”.
“I’m flattered that he would say that about me,” Greene responded. “I would want to believe, hope to believe, that I was up there at the top.”

from: chinadaily.com.cn

Former Olympic and world 100 metres champion Maurice Greene announced his retirement from athletics on Monday.
The 33-year-old American, who also held the 100 metres world record of 9.79 seconds for more than three years, said a calf injury he sustained in training last month had convinced him to end his career.
“Today I’m officially announcing my retirement from the sport,” he told reporters in Beijing.
“I don’t think I can have that mental battle with myself coming back from injury any more. It takes a lot out of you mentally … you start getting down and then you get depressed.”
“This is Olympic year, something I wanted to do so bad. So I just decided to call it quits … I want other people in the sport to shine.”
A native of Kansas City, Greene made his breakthrough by claiming the 100 metres gold at the 1997 world championships.
In June 1999 in Athens, he ran a world record time of 9.79 seconds, carving five hundredths of a second off Donovan Bailey’s three year old mark.
That same August in Seville, he became first man to win the 100m and 200m titles at a single world championships and a year later he won the Olympic 100 metres at the Sydney Games. He added another Olympic gold in the sprint relay.
His world mark survived until Tim Montgomery ran 9.78 in 2002, although Montgomery was later stripped of the record after being found guilty of using banned substances.
“I’ve had so many highlights, my first Olympic gold medal, my first world championship gold, breaking the world record indoors and outside,” Greene said.
“All of them mean something to me, something special in my heart. I just wanted to be the best I could be, I wanted to be the greatest of all time.”

A SHOCKER
Tyson Gay, who matched Greene’s sprint double at last year’s world championships in Osaka and hopes to repeat the feat at August’s Beijing Olympics, was surprised by his compatriot’s retirement.
“It’s a shocker to me,” he told Reuters at a training event organised by his personal sponsors Adidas. “Not having Maurice Greene around in track and field any more is just like Michael Jordan retiring from basketball, or Tiger Woods retiring.
Greene, who ran the 100 metres in less than 10 seconds a record 52 times, said he hoped the success of his career would be measured not just by the four Olympic medals and five world championship gold medals he won. “I hope people remember me as a great athlete but more than anything as a great person to be around,” he said.

from: chinadaily.com.cn